Office Hours through Zoom

Office Hour with Canvas Zoom and Canvas Calendar

Office Hours in Canvas Calendar with Appointment Slots

The Appointment Group function in the Canvas Calendar allows you to offer weekly appointment slots across all of your Canvas courses. You create the appointment slots once and students in any of your courses can sign up for them, or you can create specific Appointment Groups for specific classes. 

First, create your Zoom meeting. You can do this in one of two ways.

1. Zoom: log in to Zoom and create your meeting and copy the link to use later
2. Zoom in Canvas: From one of your courses select Zoom from the course Navigation and create your Zoom meeting and copy the link to the meeting.

Next, open your Canvas Calendar, double-click on a date to add a calendar item, and select the Appointment Group Tab.

Configure your Appointment Group

1. Name the Group (such as Office Hours, or, if you have separate office hours for different classes, include the course name;
2. Note a location (like "My Virtual Office" or, if you have meetings set by class, "Zoom" and enter the link to the Zoom meeting);
3. Select the course calendars you want the Group to appear on. You can select multiple classes;
4. Select the date and time range--you can schedule multiple dates and times at once;
5. Set time length for each slot;
6. Select appropriate options;
7. Save/Publish

Office hours with Waiting Room Enabled

If you prefer to hold office hours where students can drop in without an appointment you can create a Zoom meeting with a waiting room where you can admit students as they arrive or one-by-one.

Schedule office hours in Zoom (in your Canvas course)

To schedule office hours with a waiting room through Canvas Zoom, choose the "waiting room" option when scheduling your meeting.

Schedule office hours directly in Zoom

You can also create office hours with a waiting room for all of your classes to access directly in your Zoom account, then share the link and password with your classes. This will create a single "office" that you can link to for all of your classes. The advantage of this method is that you can create a recurring meeting in Zoom that has the same settings for all of the meetings (e.g. a waiting room).

From your Zoom account, select "Schedule a New Meeting".

Fill in the meeting details. To enable a waiting room, select "enable waiting room."

To share your office hours with students, you can link the meeting invite URL to your office hours in your syllabus or course announcement: